


Remember Me

by vatreniworld



Category: Men's Football RPF
Genre: Also includes, Baby Luka, Color Theory, Doubt, Gen, Introspection, Mentions of Blood, brief mentions of death, lots of family moments
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-22
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-10-14 15:58:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17511569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vatreniworld/pseuds/vatreniworld
Summary: His life truly was vibrant in color.An analysis of Luka Modrić through color.





	Remember Me

**Author's Note:**

> Musical Inspiration: "Reborn" by Really Slow Motion

##  _White_

Being four was hard.

He did not have long legs. It was tough keeping up with the goats. It was even tougher keeping up with his grandfather.

A snowflake fluttered through the sky and landed on the eyelashes of his right eye. Luka tried to pinch the snowflake between his fingers – he wanted to get a better look – only for it to melt before he had the chance to realize what happened.

“Luka!” a voice heralded from the top of the rocky hill.

His grandfather raised his walking stick and gestured for Luka to follow.

The bells around the goats’ necks clattered noisily in the still winter air. Though Modrići was not far north compared to places in Slavonia (or even towns in other countries), it still had its fair share of colder days – many of which had the threat of snow looming in the air – that left Luka’s cheeks chapped and made herding the goats a greater chore.

Luka took his stick (something his grandfather snapped off a dying tree) and tapped the back of the goats’ legs to get them up the hill faster. He stumbled a couple times over the rocks and the cumbersome shape of the boots his father made him wear. When he finally reached the top with the remaining goats, he glanced up at his grandfather.

Luka wondered if he would ever be that tall.

His grandfather’s gaze stretched far beyond just the land below.

Luka ached to know what his grandfather watched and sought.

“C’mon now, Luka,” the man broke the silence, brushing stray snowflakes out of the boy’s hair. “Let’s get you home.”

Once they finished with their task of herding the goats, Luka and his grandfather entered his home while they waited for Luka’s parents to return from work. While his grandfather heated some soup on the stove, Luka scampered to the corner of his room to find his favorite football. (It was the only one remaining after a series of…incidents between Luka learning to kick and goats being rather goat-ful.)

“ _Deda_!” Luka exclaimed, running through the house with the ball held firmly in his hands. “ _Deda_ , watch me!”

His grandfather glanced over his shoulder and said firmly, “You know the rules. No playing with the ball in the kitchen.”

“Aw…,” Luka groaned, crestfallen, hugging the ball against his chest and backing out of the kitchen.

“Dinner will be ready in a few minutes. Put the ball aside for now. You can show me after you eat.”

In just those few words, Luka perked up again. “Okay!” He made a beeline for the living room and carefully placed the ball between the armchair and the sofa so it could not roll away.

After dinner, Luka performed a series of dribbles up and down the hall for his grandfather. He wanted to mimic things he saw the older kids doing on the football fields in town. He thought he was pretty good at it, but he knew he needed to practice more to get better.

Luka poked his head around the corner of the doorway between the hall and the living room where his grandfather watched with a humored twinkle in his eye. “Can I kick it?”

His grandfather rolled his eyes to the heavens and muttered something indecipherable under his breath. “No, Luka, that’s dangerous. Why don’t you try dribbling some more?”

Luka nodded and turned his attention back to his ball.

“ _Deda_?”

“Hm?”

“Is it okay if the white circles,” he knew they were not circles but did not know  _what_ they were, “aren’t white anymore?”

His grandfather chuckled, “Dear Luka, of course it’s alright.”

Luka blinked. “Why?”

“Well,” he leaned back in the armchair and sighed, running a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair, “very few things in life  _are_  pure white. It also shows just how much you love that ball.”

Luka did not really understand what that meant, but if his grandfather said so, it had to be true. “I must love you lots, then,  _deda_.” With that, he lined his foot meticulously behind the ball and ran through another set of dribbles until his parents got home.

His grandfather’s laughter rang melodically through the house.

* * *

##  _Red_

“Shit!” Luka hissed.

His head throbbed so much he could hardly feel the road for a few seconds.

The metallic tang of blood flooded his mouth. He must have bitten his tongue when he tripped.

Luka pressed his hands against the ground. His elbows – gangly, knobby, and unmistakably those of a boy on the front cusp of puberty – quivered against his weight and the pain radiating across his chin, chest, and knees. He pushed backwards over his toes and heels until he fell onto his bottom on the hard, unflinching road.

He turned his palms up. Pellets of crimson blood dotted the expanse of his hands.

At the sting of wind across his chin, Luka gingerly tapped the back of his knuckles against the skin. He lowered his hand and stretched it in front of him to check the skin. A smear of blood the same color as on his palms cut diagonally from his index to ring fingers.

He thought that was the worst of it until another splash of red flashed in his periphery.

Luka glance down and groaned under his breath, “Mama’s gonna kill me.”

The fabric of his jeans was already thin. In fact, his mother had said for weeks that they were in serious need of mending. Now, with a gaping rip where once there was fraying cotton, the blood of his scraped knees seeped into snapped threads.

He had to be extra quiet opening and shutting the door to the hotel room when he returned. It would only take a couple steps to get over to his clothes and change, hopefully before his mother noticed he was back.

He should have known it was a bad plan when he forgot he needed to clean up his chin and palms, too.

Regardless, he did not make it to his clothes in time.

“Luka,” a calm voice called over his shoulder, “what happened to your knee?”

Luka gulped. “Nothing, mama,” he said.

She sighed, “Come here.”

Obediently, he turned around and shuffled towards her, head hung low enough that he thought he could hide the scrape on his chin.

“What happened?” she asked once he was close enough to inspect. She cupped his cheeks with her palms and tilted his head back. Clicking her tongue, she muttered, “I’ll need to clean that up.”

She silently turned over her shoulder to gather some materials.

“I tripped,” Luka blurted once his mother’s back completely faced him. “I-I don’t know what I tripped over, bu-but I just,” he chewed his lip, “faceplanted on the road.”

She hummed and ran a washcloth under the faucet. “I think you’re lucky you didn’t faceplant. You’d probably have broken your nose.”

Unconsciously, he tapped the tip of his nose to reassure it was still intact.

Effortlessly, his mother turned around and dabbed the dried blood off his chin. “Did you chip any teeth?” she asked evenly.

He did not know. He opened his mouth wide enough for her to check.

She glanced inside. “Only looks like you bit your tongue.” Grabbing him gently by the wrist, she said, “Let me see your hands.”

As he lifted his palms toward her, Luka peeped, “Mama, why is blood red?”

His mother pried her attention away from her task to look beyond his shoulder at the opposite wall with peeling yellow wallpaper. She furrowed her brows and licked her lips. “Well,” she sniffed and glanced back down at his hands, “I don’t know exactly  _why_  it’s that way, but it is what it is.”

Luka nodded.

“But, I – take off your jeans,” she interrupted her own stream of thought.

As Luka undid the button and the zipper, she continued, “But, everyone’s blood is red. It’s why we have red on our flag – as a reminder of everyone who came before us.”

_Deda’s blood was red._

Luka slid his jeans off and handed them to his mother to soak the blood stains. He finished cleaning the wound on his knee.

“I’m sorry I ruined them,” he said somberly, wiping a small trickle of snot running down his upper lip with the back of his hand.

His mother smiled sweetly. “Not ruined,” she corrected. “A bit torn up, but nothing a patch can’t fix.” With a playful ruffle of his hair, she instructed, “Now, go put some alcohol on those and wash up for dinner. Your papa’ll be hungry when he gets home.”

Luka stared at the bright red, raw skin of his palms with blood teeming beneath the surface – the same color as his mother’s, father’s, sisters’, grandfather’s.

“Yes, mama.”

* * *

##  _Black_

In his line of work, Luka understood that the range of opinions across every medium of media was as vast as an ocean. Journalists – or people that liked to call themselves such – were fickle creatures, but not nearly as fickle and will-o’-the-wisp as football fans.

Luka dealt with his fair share of obstacles. Whether emotional or physical, everyone in the sport had their own walls to climb. He knew how to handle it.

_Worst Signing of the Year_

_Luka Modrić (32.2%)_

As a sentiment, the poll was nothing new. He heard similar (if not identical) things from his coaches in Zadar, in Zagreb, in London, and now in Madrid. What was one more series of insults added onto the pile?

Still, it was a blow to the gut to see it printed so plainly in black and white on his laptop screen. At least if insults were hurled at his face or his back there was some life to them. With print, though, there was something intangibly cold and dead. It was a sheet of black ice on the road to his goals.

Luka supposed that it was meant to be an unbiased display of the facts. (Journalism was supposed to be based on fact,  _right_?) Then again, nothing titled “MARCA.com’s Online Reader Poll” could possibly be any objective evaluation of his skills as a footballer.

A pair of arms draped over his shoulders gently and wrapped around his neck loosely. The scent of Vanja’s shampoo filled his nostrils.

He felt her chin drop on the crown of his head.

“Why are you still reading that?” she asked, the sound rumbling through her jaw into his hair.

Luka clicked his tongue and shut the laptop. “Dunno,” he sighed.

“You’ve never doubted yourself before,” Vanja said, her fingernails delicately scratching the nape of his neck. “Why waste time thinking over the opinions of complete strangers?”

Luka placed a hand over hers. He traced his thumb over her knuckles. “I’m used to facing my doubters head on. I can’t do that here.”

“They took an anonymous poll,” she retorted matter-of-factly. “They don’t  _want_  to face you. People like this can’t say it to your face, so they take the easy way out.”

Luka sighed through his nose. “You’re right,” he whispered.

Vanja’s weight disappeared from his shoulders. “Wait here,” she said, exiting the kitchen to the main hall.

Luka frowned. He asked tentatively, “What for?”

Vanja glanced over her shoulder for the briefest of moments to fix him with a steadying look. “You’ll see,” she replied cryptically.

Luka busied his hands by adjusting his bangs while he waited for Vanja to return. He licked his lips and tugged the dead skin between his teeth.

The sound of her light footsteps padding on the floor shook him from his thoughts. Vanja smiled softly and placed a piece of paper on the back of his laptop.

Luka examined the piece of paper, bemused. He delicately took the edges of the paper in his fingers as though it were as fragile as a newborn.

Scribbles and splashes of color filled every speck of space on the sheet. Clouds mixed with shades of blues and purples took up the top corners. The sun was the largest figure in the top third – more orange than yellow, but still recognizable as the sun.

The bottom third of space was dedicated to messy scratches of green meant to be grass. Some of the blades were tall enough to touch the sky.

Luka’s eyes dragged to the center where a figure with a full head of wild straw colored hair and a headband kicked something that looked vaguely like a football. He smiled fondly at the stick-like legs attached to humongous feet. (He squinted at the faint lines of sketches, erases, and resketches where the artist was unsatisfied with his work.)

On the far right, written in black carefully printed Croatian letters as neat as a two-year-old could manage, was a message.

**My papa is best football player. He work hard. I like to watch him play.**

Luka glanced up at Vanja with wide eyes. “Ivano made this?” he gasped. He felt his cheeks begin to flush with pride.

Vanja nodded. “For you.”

“Do you think…he’d be okay with me putting this in my locker?”

She leaned down to kiss his forehead and rest her chin on his shoulder so their cheeks brushed. “Don’t you think that’s why he made it?”

Luka snorted in spite of himself. “Yeah.”

* * *

##  _Silver_

_France 4 - 2 Croatia_

The president, drenched from head to toe, beamed. She exclaimed, “A silver that shines like gold!” and pulled him into an embrace fiercer than anything social protocol dictated for this situation.

Though said with the best intentions, the words rang hollow in Luka’s ears.

The medal was his cross to bear, his anchor dragging him into the deep. There had to have been more that he could have done to give victory to his team, his country.

 _What_  that more was, he did not know. Would he ever know, though? He could watch and rewatch and hash and rehash his movements through every second of the World Cup and he would still come to the same conclusion: he couldn’t have done any more.

The  _team_  had nothing more to give.

Did that make the loss better or worse?

The Moscovian rain soaked him to the bone. It was impossible to distinguish the rain from the sweat and the sweat from the tears. A concoction of the three trickled down the bridge of his nose and dripped off the tip, splattering on the medal like some abstract piece of art.

Still, he had to be a captain. He had to go through the motions with the press and with the team and with the presidents of the countries even though these were the last things he wanted to do at the moment.

When the sun hit the medal at  _just_  the right angle, the calcified splatters of rain, sweat, and tears did glisten a color reminiscent of gold.

But gold it was not.

With the excessive nature of Doček, Luka could forget for a few hours that the medal around his neck was the wrong color. He could forget that knot of despair that said all his efforts – all his  _teammates’_  efforts – were for naught.

He was grateful for the oblivion of dreamless sleep that night.

The next day and the next round of celebrations proved to be more insightful than Luka could have ever imagined.

The boat rocked beneath his feet as he gripped the lines to steady his footing on the edge of the ship. A moment later a pair of secure arms wrapped around his thighs.

Luka peeked down to find his father laughing and less holding Luka and more smothering with a hug.

Something struck Luka. The festivities of Zadar slowed to a crawl around him.

His father’s hair was a spectrum of silver. The warm glow of the sunset over the water reflected off his hair like a spotlight.

If Luka had to guess, he’d say that eighty percent of his father’s hair was silver.

_When did that happen?_

In his musings, he lost his balance for a split second.

His father’s hold remained secure and steadfast. He always was a fixture of fortitude in Luka’s life.

As quickly as Luka faltered, he regained equilibrium.

“I’ve got you!” he father bellowed over the multitudes of people singing  _“Moja Domovina”_.

Luka smiled – he tried to make it look less bittersweet than it felt – and took one hand off the lines to pat the side of his father’s head and stroke the delicate feathering hair. “Thank you, papa,” he said quietly.

To the average onlooker, Stipe Modrić was too engrossed in the festivities to hear his son.

But Luka knew better.

He bit his lip as the warm summer wind spun through his hair. He took a moment to run his thumb across the engraving etched on the medal.

Maybe silver did shine brighter than gold.

* * *

##  _Gold_

The setting felt too ostentatious.

Some form of gold plated the entire venue - real gold, fools gold, spray-painted gold - and in a corner off stage left, displayed proudly on a pedestal, was the World Cup trophy. It gleamed with the intensity of ten suns as five (at least five visible) spotlights bathed the trophy in a cascade of different hues of golden light. Someone obviously spent hours carefully polishing the cup’s finish.

_Zlato_

“Don’t look at it,” Vanja said in his ear calmly, though even she could not mask the faintest edge in her tone.

It was an ‘easier said than done’ kind of order.

Luka knew Vanja was right. She needed not remind him; dwelling on it only made knots in his heart.

He would throw all of these trophies away – Golden Ball, UEFA Player of the Year, FIFA The Best Player of the Year, and as sacrilegious as it sounded, the Ballon d’or – for another chance to give Croatia a World Cup victory. What use were individual trophies, anyway? With whom could he share them?

Luka sighed and reached up to run a hand through his hair only to stop halfway with a huff of frustration. He diverted his hands to fiddle with the cufflinks of his jacket.

“Papa,” a voice somehow peeped over the heavy bass of the music echoing through the hall.

Luka glanced down.

Ema’s focused yet distant gaze was a portrait of wide-eyed bafflement. “Are you okay?” she asked, her fingers twirling around the strap of her purse.

With a soft smile, Luka knelt to one knee and smoothed out non-existent wrinkles on Ema’s dress. “Yes, Ema. I’m good.” He licked his lips. “Maybe a bit nervous.”

Ema placed a hand on his shoulder and declared gravely, “It’s okay to be nervous.”

Luka would have laughed at the irony of the situation if his body were not so stiff. Here he was, center stage of the most prestigious award in his sport, getting a pep-talk from his five-year-old daughter.

At his apparent silence, Ema frowned.

Luka gulped at the prickling sensation of Ivano and Vanja’s identical gazes fixed on the back of his head. The murmurs and mutterings in a language he couldn’t understand from the other attendees were swarms of insects in his ears.

He loosely grasped Ema’s hands in one of his own. He used his free hand to gently massage out the crease between her eyebrows. In the warm glow of the hall, he couldn’t help but notice how golden Ema’s hair looked, how bright her shoe-button eyes glistened, how much straighter her posture was.

“Yeah, it’s okay to be nervous, but I won’t be too nervous as long as you’re here,” Luka whispered, as though it were a confession. “I’m glad you’re here.” He glanced over his shoulder at Vanja and Ivano, his father and mother. “I’m glad you’re all here.”

Gold was Vanja’s smile even when she was exhausted. Gold was Ivano, Ema, and Sofia running along the shores on a summer day, splashing each other with streams of water. Gold was the love Luka could still see in his mother and father’s eyes – for each other, for their family, for their lives. Gold was Luka’s courage to keep going even when he thought his body couldn’t.

Gold was each blessing in his life.

Gold was the promise of tomorrow’s sunrise and a chance to try again.


End file.
